


the worst part is there's no one else to blame

by phae



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, But he also forgives, Character Study, Clint Pheels, Clint holds grudges, Clint's plan to protect Phil backfires, Fix-It, M/M, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-17
Updated: 2013-03-17
Packaged: 2017-12-05 16:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/725318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phae/pseuds/phae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki wants Phil. Clint gives him Tasha.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the worst part is there's no one else to blame

**Author's Note:**

> My head-canon for why Clint told Loki so much about Natasha. Because he fights back against Loki's control sometimes, and he seems the type to try to keep his mouth shut about certain things no matter what.
> 
> Title is from Sia's _Breathe Me_.

Clint is loyal, no matter what Trick or the Swordsman or Barney or _fucking SHIELD_ thinks. He’s loyal to a goddamn fault, and it’s a problem. But he’s also self-aware, knows that he’s _too_ loyal, so he’s extremely careful about who he pledges his allegiance to. Because those few he chooses to let through, he’ll let get away with anything, and he’ll forgive all their trespasses (see: _Trickshot, the Swordsman, Barney, Fury_ ). It’s a dangerous way to be, so Clint’s picky and slow to trust, and while he may forgive his few easily, he never forgets. He lets everytime he’s misplaced his trust serve to remind him why he does his best not to let in anyone new.

Loki bypasses every mental failsafe Clint’s got in place with the tap of a fucking spear and a mocking, “You have heart.” Blue magic shoots through his veins like electricity running along a cable, relaxing his muscles and guiding his arm to holster his gun. The current in his veins creates a distracting hum, and he can’t remember where he is or what he was doing, but then there’s a surge in the flow of magic and he has _purpose_. He walks over to Loki, tells him they need to leave, that Fury’s trying to stall them, and the magic resonates with a pleasant buzz through his bones.

But then the magic is pushing his arms up to aim his gun at Fury, curling his fingers in to urge them into pulling the trigger, and Clint can’t let that happen ‘cause Fury is the director of SHIELD. Fury listened when Coulson said they should recruit him instead of eliminating him when his extracurricular activities put him on SHIELD’s shit list. Fury backed him when the first round of handlers Clint had all practically demanded his head on the chopping block for insubordination and being a general pain in the ass. Fury, for all he’s a stone-cold bastard, is someone Clint trusts enough to take orders from, so why does the magic want to hurt him when Clint obviously doesn’t?

Clint tries to scream, “Fuck you, like hell I will!” but his mouth doesn’t open, his vocal chords don’t vibrate at his silent command. Instead, the magic burns through him, though it isn’t burning him like fire, but like dry ice. And when he refuses to succumb to the pain, when he jerks the gun down to avoid a kill shot, the ice in his veins sparks back into a current and electricity is frying every synapse up and down his nervous system until he doesn’t give a shit about yelling out protests anymore, he just wants to cry out in pure agony, but that’s not allowed either.

It hurts, so much that he can’t think to describe it as anything but pulsing pain, but it’s a good kind of hurt, the kind that means he won’t survive long, the kind that overwhelms the brain and stresses the heart into giving out. Clint thinks that at least if he’s dead he won’t be able to hurt anyone, wonders if the Sisters praying for his soul is enough to save it 'cause he sure as Hell never did anything to save himself, and then the pain just ends. It’s there, filling every sense though he can’t express it outside of perceiving it in every corner of his brain, and then it’s all gone, not fading out to black as he goes under or keels over, but just disappearing in a blink like the magic that it is. He wants to stagger, wants to gasp at the shock of it, but his body isn’t his anymore. The magic controls him, overrides his mind, and Loki controls the magic.

Loki demands obedience, demands undivided loyalty. The magic hands it over without Clint’s say-so and Clint finds himself doing everything that he can manage and more trying to bend his world to Loki’s will. Because Clint is loyal, and Loki has his loyalty now, stolen as it may be.

***

Loki needs disposable forces, so Clint brings in contacts from some of his undercover ops with SHIELD and a few from his merc days. Clint takes the initiative in finding a temporary headquarters safe from SHIELD’s all-seeing eyes--a HYDRA base he and Tasha divested of all personnel while hunting down the asshats that captured Coulson during a FUBAR op in Austria--for Selvig to fiddle with the Tesseract, and the magic tricks Clint’s perceptions enough to let him think Loki is proud of his actions.

Loki asks about how SHIELD will retaliate, so Clint tells him about Fury and SHIELD’s SOP. Loki pumps every last drop of intel Clint has gathered in his years lurking in air vents from him, so he learns all he needs to know about the Helicarrier’s security (normally not easily compromised, but Clint isn’t usually the one seeking to compromise it) and Fury’s response team (SHIELD’s highly trained senior agents, ‘cause he never trusts the juniors with shit this important).

“They’ll be putting together a team,” Clint volunteers.

“Are they a threat?”

Clint thinks of the dysfunctional superheroes SHIELD will call on to salvage this clusterfuck. The Avengers Initiative: Rogers the Super Depressed Super Soldier, Stark the Giant Ego Who Can Annoyingly Back it all Up with His Massive Brain, and Banner the Uncontrollable Rage Monster Currently in the Wind. He replies, “To each other, more than likely. But if Fury can get them on track, and he might, they could throw some noise our way.”

Loki has a calculating tilt to his head. “You admire Fury.”

“He’s got a clear line of sight.”

Calculation turns to biting judgement, and the magic shocks him in conjunction with Loki’s spike in irritation. “Is that why you failed to kill him?”

“It might be,” Clint hedges. The magic tries to drag truths out of him, and Clint struggles to give the magic what it wants while still keeping his private thoughts inside his own head. “I was disoriented. And I’m not at my best with a gun.”

Loki rounds on him, scepter in hand and glowing ominously. “I don’t like secrets, Agent Barton. Well, I adore keeping them from others, but I abhor having them kept from me. So tell me, what are you hiding?”

Clint holds his ground and lets the magic keep his posture relaxed and open. “Not hiding anything, Sir. I’ve told you everything I know, answered everything you’ve asked.”

“And what about the things I haven’t asked?”

Clint _has_ done everything asked of him, he’s been at Loki’s beck and call for a good 32 hours without food or sleep, and still Loki wants more. He wants to know how to tear Clint apart because controlling his body isn’t good enough anymore. Loki regards him with cruel eyes that narrow the longer he holds back, and the magic swarms across Clint’s nerve endings until it’s tingling at every edge of his perception, ready to force the words from his throat.

“Who are you protecting, Agent Barton?”

Loki wants his team; his partner and his handler. Loki wants the ones who always watch Clint’s back, the ones Clint has never betrayed because he is loyal, and they deserve that loyalty more than anyone else.

Pain begins to emanate from Clint’s stomach. It crawls up his chest to grip his heart and squeeze.

Loki wants Phil. Clint gives him Tasha.

Loki’s thin lips stretch back to reveal lines of sharp white teeth. “Ah. _Tasha_. She sounds positively delightful. Tell me about her?”

Clint stops fighting the magic and speaks. Guilt doesn’t drag him under and weigh him down. Tash can take care of herself. She gets super pissed at him when he implies otherwise by straying back to check her position every few minutes on ops when he’s supposed to be covering everyone.

Plus, she owes him. She betrayed him first, though just the once, and in her mind she was doing what was right by him, trying to keep Clint from getting involved with the shitheads that were after her. But she still left him behind, naked and blissed-out in a shitty motel room near the Nevada border long before SHIELD was on either of their radars. Whispered that she was ducking out to grab them dinner, then he slipped into a dreamless sleep and woke up to his least favorite nightmare. ‘Cause while he knew that everyone left him behind eventually, it always tore him to pieces everytime it happened. And a few years later, he'd risked everything he’d finally managed to build up for himself when he convinced Coulson to let him bring in the Black Widow in handcuffs instead of a body bag, unable to bring himself to pull the trigger with her in his crosshairs.

Granted, Phil is more than capable of taking care of himself too. Especially if they’re attacked on the Helicarrier where Phil’s usually holed up in front of his laptop at his desk, surrounded by innocuous yet deadly office supplies. But where Clint is willing to let Nat look after herself except when she really needs his help (which is a good deal more often than she’s ever likely to admit), he can’t bring himself _not_ to do everything he can to look out for Coulson. ‘Cause Coulson’s never doubted his skills, never left him behind in enemy territory, never left him alone in medical when he’s too antsy to stay but too injured to leave. Out of everyone in Clint’s life that he’s ever trusted, few as they are, Phil Coulson is the only one who’s never betrayed him, not even in a minor way. Clint’s wired to respect that kind of loyalty and reciprocate it in equal kind.

So Clint fights the magic by giving in where he can. He gives Loki everything he has on Tasha, just as much the real tidbits he’s slowly discovered as the lies she prefers him to believe, and doesn’t utter a single syllable concerning Agent Phillip J. Coulson.

***

In the end, Clint’s struggles to hide Phil from the magic and Loki are all for shit. Loki grabs on to Tash with all the eagerness of a beagle cornering a fox. He leaves Clint with orders to rip her apart in the most inhumane ways possible once he’s disabled the Helicarrier, so Clint’s headed into the vents to stalk her through the chaos when she finds him. The magic swells within his mind and his arms raise, but Clint manages to push against it just enough to slow down his body’s reaction time by nearly a half second. It’s not much, but it’s more than enough to give Nat her window to take him out, which she does swiftly and painfully.

When Clint wakes up--well, when Clint manages to pull himself together enough to think beyond how wrong he feels, missing the soothing clarity of the magic controlling him at the same time as he’s trying to claw out every last memory of it from his psyche--he realizes he’s played his hand too close to the chest. It’s like the magician who traveled with Carson’s for a few months told him when he was teaching Clint some slight-of-hand: you want the audience focused on the pretty girl so they don’t notice the man behind the curtain, but if they stay _too_ focused on the girl, they’re likely to miss the trick entirely--it’s a fine line between misdirection and distraction.

Loki toyed with Tasha, yeah, tried to give her a good mindfuck, but in the end he left her for Clint to finish off himself. When Phil went after Loki with an experimental Phase II blaster, he was the ever overlooked Agent Coulson, and Loki didn’t hesitate to ram a fucking spear through his heart.

And now Tasha’s fine, like he knew she’d be, but Phil’s barely surviving on next-gen life support. Fury’s got a muted look in his eye that tells Clint how likely Phil is to pull through, so Clint doesn’t bother to tell the rest of the Avengers that they’re mourning a still-living man. He hacks medical’s security cameras without Stark’s help and locates a room with no visual inside but too much man-power standing guard at the door to ignore.

The ventilation system in medical was modified on the Helicarrier--smaller openings for the room vents and crawlspaces that a child would have difficulty squeezing through. The mods were done primarily with Clint in mind, meant to ensure he’d stay put in medical when Coulson wasn’t on hand to keep him there. The rooms all have drop ceilings though, some kind of attempt at making the place look more like a hospital as if anybody'd be more comfortable there, and while they don’t provide the same amount of easy access and movement throughout the wing, they still make excellent places to hide.

Clint sets off the fire alarm down the hall from Phil’s room. The damage here, while significantly less than the rest of the carrier currently grounded in the Atlantic, is still prominent enough that various alarms keep going off infrequently. The two guards on the door adjust their positions, one going down the hall to investigate and make sure it’s a false alarm while the other covers the hallway by facing the nursing station at the end of it. Generally a good strategy, given that it’s the only visible access point to this room at the end of a hallway, but Clint drops down behind him silently from the ventilation access and slips through the door.

Phil’s the only occupant inside if you don’t count the massive machines he’s hooked up to. Clint glances over their readouts long enough to ascertain Phil’s heart is beating, though sluggishly and with ample assistance. Then he’s using the sole visitor’s chair to reach the ceiling and shift aside a tile and boost himself up. He settles along the crossbeams, closes his eyes, and slows his breathing to match the erratic beeps of the heart monitor.

He’s so exhausted that he’s hyper-aware, and the adrenaline that’s been keeping his legs moving is draining away now that he’s stationary, so his body’s trying to fall asleep, but his brain’s too wired to allow it. He knows that there’s nothing he can do for Phil right now, that if some threat did find him down here in medical, Clint’s too out of it to protect him, but Clint doesn’t want to go to sleep and wake up to find Phil gone from the room below, or worse, still there, but hooked up to silent machines.

It reminds him of that Aerosmith song, and he’s delirious enough at this point to not challenge the thought. He don’t want to fall asleep, ‘cause he'd miss you, babe, and he don’t want to miss a thing. He wants Phil to wake up. Needs him to. But the heart monitor just keeps beeping with no discernable pattern, and as much as that worries Clint, he holds on to the fact that at least it’s still beeping.


End file.
